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The Sport Digest - ISSN: 1558-6448

The High Salaries of Professional Athletes

With the recent signing of Daisuke Matsuzaka (Dice K) by the Boston Red Sox for $103 million, it appears that salaries of professional athletes will continue to climb. There’s no telling how high they will go. An historical review of literature shows that in 1947, Hank Greenberg was the first professional baseball player to make $100,000. In today’s dollars, that is worth about $800,000. Certainly, pro salaries have escalated greatly since that time and have escalated disproportionately. In 2005, the average salary of a worker in the U.S. was just over $40,000 but the average salary of a Major League Baseball player was approximately $2,400,000. It’s hard to believe that the baseball cards that I collected as a youth had cartoons on the back and sometimes the cartoon said things such as, “(Name inserted here) sells shoes for Sears and Roebuck in the off-season.” How times have changed!

Before Barry Zito recently signed the largest contract ever for a pitcher, Mike Hampton was the highest paid pitcher at $121 million. The $14 million-a-year Atlanta Braves pitcher was hurt last year. Based on his 1,015 pitches in 2005, that works out to $13,793 for each pitch. The salary escalation isn’t just in baseball. English soccer superstar David Beckham signed this year with the Los Angeles Galaxy for five years with a $250 million dollar contract.

As sport franchises continue to make profits, especially baseball clubs, there doesn’t appear to be an end to salary escalation. As much as I personally don’t like to see professional athletes, many of whom have little education, make exorbitant salaries, I do think that these salaries are justified based on economic principles, such as supply and demand. If consumers (fans) are still willing to pay the price for tickets, cable packages, team-logo sportswear, etc., then the demand does exist.

Additionally, I think it is unfair to single out professional athletes whereas movie stars, such as Jodie Foster, command multi-million dollar contracts for each movie in which they act. Entertainers in the music industry command similar wages. Rarely does one hear outrage towards the price of concert tickets compared to how people complain about the salaries of athletes and the price of sport-related items.